David Simon Doesn’t Want His Pornography Show to Be Sexy

Characters on The Deuce spend a lot of time counting bills. The new HBO series from David Simon and George Pelecanos portrays a world backed by cash—from a prostitute handing her nightly earnings to her pimp to a porn director paying his actors after a day’s work. This is Times Square in the 1970s, where a thriving sex industry paved the way from prostitution to legalized pornography—where women often set their price, but rarely enjoy the profit. By the fourth or fifth time we see a character thumb through a wad of cash, we get the picture: The Deuce is a show about the sex trade, but it’s actually a show about capital.

Television shows that examine the interconnections of sex, wealth, and power are standard fare for HBO—especially if they’ve also got a measure of violence. But The Deuce, which debuts on September 10, isn’t just any show about the sex industry; it’s a David Simon show about the sex industry, which means it’s investigative and probing rather than purely titillating.

“We always say, ‘Why are we doing this?’” Pelecanos tells V.F. “What is this about? It can’t just be a show about pornography.”

Simon echoes that idea. “Why a show about pornography? The reason is it speaks to not only economic constructs, but to how even the basic language of sexuality has been changed in the last 40 years. First thing in a writers’ room is usually ‘why are we doing this show.’ You have to come up with reasons that matter, or you have to move on to another story.”

Simon, a former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, readily admits that he prefers journalism to sensationalism. In his previous HBO programs—The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, Treme, and Show Me a Hero—his approach has been to take a complex topic (the drug war or housing segregation, for instance) and examine it from myriad vantage points at every stratum of society: everyday people, local politicians, police officers, and so on. Pelecanos is a prolific writer of detective fiction whose work, Simon says, is “rooted in social realism” and who relies similarly on investigative research. Simply put, these aren’t the guys you’d peg as prurient entertainers.

It was the locations manager on Treme who first recommended that Simon and Pelecanos meet with a former Times Square bar manager who supposedly had incredible stories about 42nd Street, back when it was called “the Deuce”—a nickname from the ‘70s meant to suggest the area’s seedy atmosphere.

Simon and Pelecanos were already repeat collaborators by then; Pelecanos was a writer and producer on The Wire and Treme. But this would be their first time developing a new show together, and they went into the meeting equally skeptical. The material seemed pretty well worn: “What are you gonna make out of that”—the raunchy heyday of Times Square—“that isn’t known?” Simon recalls thinking.

But as he and Pelecanos learned how pornography changed the game for both sex workers and society in general, “George and I looked at each other and thought, ‘My God.’ There was a power to it. Everything was in a brown paper bag under the counter, and then suddenly the interpretation of the law changed. And where there [had been] no legal product, suddenly there was. George and I walked around outside of the meeting saying, ‘We gotta do this story.’”

HBO gave The Deuce the green light around the same time that Vinyl, another HBO series about 1970s New York, was heading toward production. “We were certainly aware of Vinyl,” Simon says. Adds Pelecanos, “What could we do? We just had to make the best pilot we could.” HBO’s decision to cancel Vinyl after its first season didn’t impact the development of The Deuce; on the contrary, the Deuce team actually benefited from it, scoring access to “warehouses full of 1970s props” that Vinyl had left behind, says Simon.

The pilot, co-written by Simon and Pelecanos, situates the viewer in 1971 and introduces multiple players: world-wise prostitutes with years of experience; newbies fresh off the bus from small-town America; well-dressed pimps with fancy cars and a sense of entitlement; Mafiosi looking to make a fortune in brothels and peep shows; a sensitive-souled police officer working within a venal police department; and a female reporter investigating city corruption. At the center of the story is blue-collar bar manager Vincent Martino, who reluctantly teams up with the Mafia and begins to profit off the sex trade. James Franco stars as Vincent as well as his twin brother, Frankie, a genial but irresponsible gambler. Franco also directs two episodes of Season 1.

As Simon and Pelecanos mapped out their character list and story structure, they quickly realized that they needed women—not only to play prostitutes, but to write, produce, and direct the show. “This can’t be the boys’ version of the rise of pornography,” Simon says. Novelists Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz came on as writers, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal became one of the show’s stars and an integral producer, and Emmy-winning director Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) was asked to helm the pilot.

MacLaren acclimated herself to 1970s New York by watching films like Panic in Needle Park and Mean Streets. She recognized early on that present-day Times Square—with its Disney musicals and stylized plazas—was no longer a match for its own gritty past. So the show’s crew went a hundred blocks north, to 164th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. They brought in period cars and piles of garbage bags to dirty up the street, then used C.G.I. effects to complete the look.

MacLaren—who directed both the pilot and season finale—portrays the daily experience of women who work the streets in the bleakest manner possible. “There’s a coldness to it,” she says of depicting prostitution on camera. “If you look at the scene with Darlene and the john, it’s violent and cold and scary.”

MacLaren’s remark alludes to a scene from the pilot featuring Dominique Fishback (Show Me a Hero), whose character, a young prostitute named Darlene, is attacked in a motel bed by a complete stranger. Moments later, we realize that the episode was staged as a crime fantasy for her customer.

“She considers it a job,” Fishback says of the scene. “She’s like, ‘I can do it. I’m tough enough.’” That the crime fantasy goes off track and becomes actually violent is no big surprise for Darlene; she simply seizes the moment and requests more money. “She’s like, ‘Honey, you have to pay for that,’” Fishback explains.

Throughout that scene, the john sits naked in an armchair as Darlene applies makeup to cover a bruise. Here and throughout the season, it’s clear that this depiction of sex work is not meant for your arousal. You might say that prostitution is to The Deuce as violence is to The Wire: raw, devastating, and difficult to watch. As Simon says: “the trick is not to make Pretty Woman.”

Granted, there are occasional sex scenes with romantic lighting—but they’re completely divorced from the flesh trade. “Probably the only places where we allowed for that is where people love each other, where they’re making love,” Pelecanos says. Those scenes are sporadic, though, and they draw a sharp contrast to the show’s primary content.

Perhaps the season’s biggest turning point is the advent of legalized pornography, which marks a new milestone in the sex industry’s ability to produce capital. Besides revenue, porn offers prostitutes who are seeking a way out a modicum of distance from their pimps. Fishback notes that as her character explores pornography, “she slowly starts to realize, ‘This is what independence feels like.’”

The character who most exemplifies independence within the sex industry is Eileen “Candy” Merrell (Gyllenhaal), a self-reliant prostitute who appears as capitalistic and business-minded as the Mafia men raking it in as brothel owners.

“She’s very aware of the power she has,” MacLaren says of Candy. “She starts to see entrepreneurial opportunities and goes for it.”

At the start of the season, Candy is portrayed as a businesswoman at the top of her game. “I think that’s how George and David originally conceived her, as a character,” Gyllenhaal says via e-mail. But midway through the season, Eileen becomes genuinely fascinated by pornography as an art form—and she envisions herself as a director, merging her business skills with artistry. “The focus became more about Candy as an artist and a filmmaker than as a business woman. That was most interesting to me. But, that said, I really think she’s both. And I think a lot of artists are.”

Candy’s arc on The Deuce is rare in its hopeful trajectory. While porn helps a few of the female characters get off the streets, it still traps them in an environment that restricts and objectifies them, where they feign desire as they hustle for every payment. The Deuce is Simon’s and Pelecanos’s investigation of that world, and they intend to scrutinize it honestly—knowing full well that the experience will be raw for audiences and far less erotic than the subject matter suggests.

For Simon and Pelecanos, an honest portrayal of 1971 Times Square is necessarily harsh, cold, and uncomfortable, with heaps of trash in every backdrop and a hovering sense of dread each time a prostitute and john enter a stark motel room. “I know it has to be entertaining or they’ll go away,” Simon says, referring to his audience. But entertainment is never the primary goal. What matters most is “being honest about the time and place. It’s got a real kick to it if you do it right.”

Gary Oldman

Immediately after Darkest Hour’s Telluride premiere Gary Oldman rocketed to the top of Oscars’ best-actor race for his performance as Winston Churchill during World War II. The naturally slender Oldman spent four hours a day in a makeup chair and wore prosthetics equal to half his body weight to play the garrulous and heavy-set British prime minister in Joe Wright’s film. Oldman, who was nominated for an Oscar his 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, came to the Churchill role reluctantly, believing he was unsuited for it physically. “I just needed to tell him he was the only man for the job, that he could do it,” Wright said of Oldman. “And I knew he could, cause he’s a genius.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ben Mendelsohn

Ben Mendelsohn plays the gentle King George VI to Gary Oldman’s rough and rousing Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’sDarkest Hour, which premiered to rousing applause at the mountain festival. An Australian actor best known in Hollywood for his work playing villains like Rogue One’s Director Krennic, Mendelsohn found pleasure in a character on the right side of history. “[The role] was a very unexpected gift given everything I’ve been doing recently,” Mendelsohn said. “I thought its was very bold. It was against the vogue of what had been going on.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Angelina Jolie, Loung Ung, Sreymoch Sareum, and Kimhak Mun

When introducing her new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, before a screening, director Angelina Jolie said that, as she sees it, it isn’t her film at all. Instead it belongs to the people of Cambodia, a nation that is in many ways just beginning to grapple with the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Fittingly, then, Jolie ceded the stage to Loung Ung, whose wartime memoir is the basis of the film, and to two of the young actors, Sreymoch Sareum and Kimhak Mun, who play the children at the center of the harrowing work-camp story. A bond between director, subject, and actors was immediately evident. The film received heaps of praise, and could be Netflix’s first serious Oscars contender.

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy

As the Telluride Film Festival’s directors, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy are the hosts who set the Rocky Mountain event’s warm tone and high bar for cinema. During the year, they screen some 200 features for consideration on their tightly curated slate, mining for the film gems that will often surge to the front of the Oscar race. Luddy, who was among the festival’s original founders in 1974, walks the town as Telluride’s spiritual godfather. Huntsinger, who came aboard in 2007, manages a festival weekend staff of roughly 500 people, and endeavors to maintain the intimacy of the festival’s early years. “I was given the keys to this new, beautiful, very complex mansion,” Huntsinger said. “You take care of this, you look after it.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Gary Oldman

Immediately after Darkest Hour’s Telluride premiere Gary Oldman rocketed to the top of Oscars’ best-actor race for his performance as Winston Churchill during World War II. The naturally slender Oldman spent four hours a day in a makeup chair and wore prosthetics equal to half his body weight to play the garrulous and heavy-set British prime minister in Joe Wright’s film. Oldman, who was nominated for an Oscar his 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, came to the Churchill role reluctantly, believing he was unsuited for it physically. “I just needed to tell him he was the only man for the job, that he could do it,” Wright said of Oldman. “And I knew he could, cause he’s a genius.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ben Mendelsohn

Ben Mendelsohn plays the gentle King George VI to Gary Oldman’s rough and rousing Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’sDarkest Hour, which premiered to rousing applause at the mountain festival. An Australian actor best known in Hollywood for his work playing villains like Rogue One’s Director Krennic, Mendelsohn found pleasure in a character on the right side of history. “[The role] was a very unexpected gift given everything I’ve been doing recently,” Mendelsohn said. “I thought its was very bold. It was against the vogue of what had been going on.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Angelina Jolie, Loung Ung, Sreymoch Sareum, and Kimhak Mun

When introducing her new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, before a screening, director Angelina Jolie said that, as she sees it, it isn’t her film at all. Instead it belongs to the people of Cambodia, a nation that is in many ways just beginning to grapple with the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Fittingly, then, Jolie ceded the stage to Loung Ung, whose wartime memoir is the basis of the film, and to two of the young actors, Sreymoch Sareum and Kimhak Mun, who play the children at the center of the harrowing work-camp story. A bond between director, subject, and actors was immediately evident. The film received heaps of praise, and could be Netflix’s first serious Oscars contender.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Barry Jenkins

Telluride is proud of all of its children, but perhaps none more so at the moment than writer-director Barry Jenkins, who first came to the festival as a student and then served on the staff for years. In 2016, Jenkins’s Telluride narrative came full circle, as his film Moonlight made its world premiere on the first night of the weekend. It later went on to win three Academy Awards, including a screenplay award for Jenkins and best picture. Though now an internationally lauded filmmaker, Jenkins has not gotten too big to help out at the festival. This year, he programmed a series of shorts and passionately introduced Greta Gerwig’s buzzed-about directorial debut, Lady Bird. No doubt Jenkins will be back again next year, as children of Telluride are nothing if not loyal.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Jamie Bell

We’ve seen Jamie Bell do ballet, become a hulking superhero, take up arms against both the Nazis and the colonial British, and go an epic C.G.I. adventure as Tintin. But we hadn’t really seen him as a romantic lead until Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, a wistful memory piece that premiered at Telluride this year. Bell plays a young man who falls in love with much older actress Gloria Grahame, played by Annette Bening. Throughout, Bell proves a dashing, sympathetic leading man, holding the center of the movie with poise and understatement. Little Billy Elliot has grown up, but remains as talented as ever. Hopefully Hollywood will take notice and give Bell more opportunities to show us what he can do. What better place to launch a career’s next phase than in Telluride?

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Emma Stone and Billie Jean King

When Emma Stone took the stage at the world premiere of Battle of the Sexes, she got an eager round of applause. When Billie Jean King walked out, she got a standing ovation. The mood in the room remained effusive as the film screened, the rousing sports drama proving an effective crowd-pleaser that has some allegorical ties to recent political events. The resounding response at Telluride could indicate strong Oscar fortunes for the film, especially for Stone, who embodies King’s tenacity and turmoil with heart and intensity. Most importantly, though, it’s a long overdue testament to a dedicated athlete and champion of women’s rights.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Richard Jenkins

This year the journeyman actor Richard Jenkins traveled to Telluride with a big movie. He plays one of the lonely hearts whose lives are changed by a Black Lagoon-esque creature in Guillermo del Toro’s exquisite monster horror-romance The Shape of Water. It’s the kind of supporting turn that could get the attention of the Academy: poignant, funny, and utterly essential to the film. Regardless of his awards chances, Jenkins turned in one of the best performances at a very stacked festival, reminding us why so many top-tier directors want to work with the guy.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Guillermo del Toro

In Telluride this year, clusters of people often gathered outside of theaters after screenings of Guillermo del Toro’s monster romance, The Shape of Water, as the warm and gregarious Mexican-American director engaged in impromptu Q&As with the crowd. Del Toro’s Cold War-set movie, in which a mute cleaning woman played by Sally Hawkins becomes intrigued by a sea creature, is about “falling in love with the other,” del Toro said. “The thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are.”

Alice Waters has been bringing her slow food message to Telluride since the 1970s, when her long-time friend, festival director Tom Luddy, first invited her. Waters also plans the menus for some festival events, and in the early years would fly in her own bread and vegetables. This year, Waters wanted to spread the message of one of Telluride’s most vivid documentaries, Eating Animals, based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer about what it means to eat animals in an industrialized world. Produced by Natalie Portman and directed by Christopher Quinn,Eating Animals spoke to Waters’s passionate belief in the superiority of traditional farming methods. “We’re in the food underground and we have to connect with others and help each other be informed,” Waters said.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Michael Barker and Tom Bernard

Kings of the arthouse, Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents and co-founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard are Telluride fixtures, who each year bring a mix of independent dramas, foreign language films, and Oscars contenders to the mountain festival, while casting an eye for new films to acquire. This year, Barker and Bernard brought the Annette Bening romance Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the Chilean transgender drama A Fantastic Woman,Chloé Zhao’s heartland portrait The Rider, and the Russian family drama Loveless.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Chloé Zhao

During a first-day press orientation at Telluride, one notable critic declared Chloé Zhao’sThe Rider the best film of the year. (So far.) It’s high praise, and just may be true. Zhao’s intimate docu-drama follows a young rodeo rider as he suffers setback after punishing setback, all captured with a piercing insight and empathy. Zhao’s film earned plaudits at the Cannes Film Festival before screening in Telluride, where cowboy life is perhaps a bit more familiar. Acclaim arrived in Colorado as well, and Zhao’s film seems on track to be one of 2017’s most beloved arthouse darlings. Pretty good for a second-time director. Zhao is well worth keeping an eye on. We certainly will be.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ted Hope, Jason Ropell, and Bob Berney

The studio is young, but the taste of the men who run it is timeless. Founded in late 2010, Amazon Studios has quickly established itself as a force in the independent-film world, thanks to movies like last year’s Oscar winners, Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman, and this summer’s breakout romantic comedy, The Big Sick.Jason Ropell, Amazon’s worldwide head of motion pictures; Ted Hope, its head of motion picture production; and Bob Berney, who runs marketing and distribution, came to Telluride this year to share their Todd Haynes film Wonderstruck, and the Ai Weiwei documentary, Human Flow. As for why Telluride is such an appealing place to bring a films, it’s the festival directors’ tastes, the abundance of Academy members who attend it, and one other factor, Hope says—“The altitude. The thin air makes every movie seem good.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Joe Wright and Anthony McCarten

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten are the brains behind Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill drama starring Gary Oldman that lit up Telluride audiences with its portrait of strong leadership in a crisis. For Wright, the festival was a chance to connect with leaders of a different sort, like fellow directors Barry Jenkins and Greta Gerwig. “I am having the time of my life,” Wright said of his Telluride experience. “Directors work in isolation quite a lot and don’t get to meet other directors, so . . . to be here and be able to share horror stories or delight or just appreciation. It’s very emotional.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Errol Morris

One of the most celebrated documentarians working today, Telluride regular Errol Morris is not content to rest on his laurels. At this year’s festival, Morris debuted perhaps his most audacious work yet, a six-part documentary/reenactment hybrid called Wormwood. A knotty and riveting story about the mysterious death of a C.I.A. operative and his son’s decades-long quest to uncover the truth, Morris’s miniseries, set to debut on Netflix in December, mixes traditional documentary interviews with staged re-creations of events, done by actors Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Jack O’Connell, among others. Though a five-hour screening is a lot to ask of busy festivalgoers, they nonetheless came in droves. The first marathon of Wormwood, which has earned rave reviews, played to a full house at Telluride’s premier venue, a 650-seat theater named after another hailed documentarian, Telluride mainstay Werner Herzog.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

The cast of Hostiles

Where better to debut an epic Western than amid the mountainous grandeur of Telluride? Which is just what producer John Lesher and director Scott Cooper did with their film Hostiles, starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi. The film—about an Army captain escorting a Cheyenne chief across, er, hostile territory—was a rare Telluride film that arrived without a distributor. When rave reviews came pouring in, it quickly became a hot commodity. The film travels next to Toronto, where one assumes it will be snapped up and given a prestige release.

Justin Bishop

Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei enlisted crew members shooting footage in some 23 countries in order to make his documentary, Human Flow, about the staggering refugee crisis unfolding around the globe. It’s a cinematic journey that ultimately lead Ai to this mountain film festival, ahead of his movie’s October release by Amazon. Telluride often programs films with a global perspective like Ai’s. As festival director Julie Huntsinger said, “To be a good humanistic person, you have to . . . see how other people live.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy

As the Telluride Film Festival’s directors, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy are the hosts who set the Rocky Mountain event’s warm tone and high bar for cinema. During the year, they screen some 200 features for consideration on their tightly curated slate, mining for the film gems that will often surge to the front of the Oscar race. Luddy, who was among the festival’s original founders in 1974, walks the town as Telluride’s spiritual godfather. Huntsinger, who came aboard in 2007, manages a festival weekend staff of roughly 500 people, and endeavors to maintain the intimacy of the festival’s early years. “I was given the keys to this new, beautiful, very complex mansion,” Huntsinger said. “You take care of this, you look after it.”